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Oracle Beginnings - Where to Start?

Posted by Cliff on from the gotta-start-somewhere dept.

Scalli0n asks: "I'm a programmer with a solid computer science background, but I'd like to know where I should start with the behemoth that is Oracle - my bosses tell me that I need to learn it to store geodatabases (since I work with geospatial intelligence) and I have no clue where to start since nobody can even tell me of a good beginners book - any suggestions?"

4 of 102 comments (clear)

  1. Ask Tom by the+eric+conspiracy · · Score: 3, Insightful

    Tom Kyte is a sort of help Guru for the Oracle community. His book Effective Oracle by Design is excellent can contains a lot references to other material.

    He also runs a web site that has been very useful to me as well.

  2. Two areas to look at by richg74 · · Score: 3, Insightful
    You didn't actually tell us whether you have any other data base experience. In general, when you're setting out to use an RDBMS (whether it's Oracle, DB/2, Sybase, PostgreSQL, whatever), there are two areas to tackle:
    1. A general understanding of how and why relational databases work.
    2. The specifics of how to use your particular platform.
    (To put it into a more purely programming context, you might think of the first as like what you might find in Knuth's Art of Computer Programming, and the second as like Kernighan & Ritchie's The C Programming Language.)

    It's been a while since I used Oracle, so I can't really give you any current recommendations for no. 2. (O'Reilly has some offerings in this category that, in their early editions, were pretty decent.) For no. 1, though, I suggest you pick up a copy of A Guide to the SQL Standard, by Chris Date and Hugh Darwen. Date is one of the "pioneers" of relational data bases, and this book is a good reference to the "why" of how they work.

  3. Re:The best place to start ... by Naikrovek · · Score: 3, Insightful

    the best place to stay? not hardly. there are plenty of situations where MySQL is the worst place to stay. In those situations, Oracle is worth every penny.

    Maybe the best place for you, but to assume that MySQL is the best DB for everyone is just plain short-sighted.

  4. Where to start: by sakusha · · Score: 3, Insightful

    At the beginning.

    I spent many years doing computer tutoring. I was quite successful with one strategy, sitting down with the client and saying, "Let's start on page 1 of the manual."

    Your Oracle software came with a manual, right?